Gold is scattered liberally throughout the modern world. Everyone from minimum-wage workers to billionaire dictators has some of this precious medal for decorative or pragmatic use. Based on its prevalence among us humans, you’d think the earth held reserves around every other bend.
But in this case, reality bites: Gold is actually an exceedingly rare substance—all the gold ever mined could be made into a 60-foot cube—and the planet’s supply is rapidly diminishing. In fact, a recent report indicates we’re only two decades away from depleting the world’s gold supply. And as easy as it is to malign pieces of personal adornment for ethics infringement, it looks like this time our latest computing gadgets and gizmos are primarily to blame.
Why Electronics Are Gold-Grubbers
You see, virtually all the gold mined from antiquity to modern times has actually been recycled. A gold necklace mined by the Romans may have been melted down into a bar of gold for tycoon bankers of the 1800s, and then into a gold watch for Junior’s graduation present in 1979.
But electronics equipment mucks up the system, because individual products use too minute amounts of conductive gold to be recycled—thus the overall sizable amount of gold used (when you multiply out quantities by the bajillions of products sold) is essentially lost. Forever and ever.
Initially this seemed like no biggie. Electronics’ golden needs were sated through booms in mining in the 1990s and early 2000s. But the easy deposits got tapped out quick, and now the viable mines are generally much deeper in the Earth, and in often-treacherous terrain like the Arctic. And gold discoveries are increasingly rare—in 2012 there were exactly zero.
Is Bacteria our Secret Gold-Making Weapon?
Beyond satisfying our aesthetic desires, gold has a unique chemical composition critical for various types of machinery, medicine and science experiments. As well as for the gold-guzzling phones and tablets largely behind the depletion, of course. What’s an iPhone-obsessed population to do?
Happily, it is possible to create gold in labs, and there’s even a type of bacteria that produces gold in its excrement (ewww/cool). Neither process is currently cost-effective, or capable of producing the mass quantities that mines yield, but at least there’s a golden glimmer of hope.
Or maybe we’ll find a pot o’ gold planet in our space exploration. Now that would be awesome.
Image: ThinkStock
